ESTIMATION OF CURVE SIMILARITY USING TURNING FUNCTIONS

The process of classifying objects is a fundamental fea- ture of most human pursuits, and the idea that people clas- sify together those things that people ¯nd similar is both intuitive and popular across a wide range of disciplines. Es- timation of di®erence between curves (curve matching) is an useful and often necessary technique in many applica- tions, including: pattern recognition, image object recogni- tion, robotic applications, computational geometry, etc. In this paper, three methods for curve matching using turning fu nctions are presented. While the ¯rst two, called plain and polygonal method, are based on a simple adapta- tion of the existing approaches, the third one, called penalty method, is a new one and tries to overcome some important problems from the ¯rst two. The advantages and essential problems of the proposed methods are also discussed. A number of examples are presented to show major di®erences among the methods and their potential usefulness. nctions are presented. While the ¯rst two, called plain and polygonal method, are based on a simple adapta- tion of the existing approaches, the third one, called penalty method, is a new one and tries to overcome some important problems from the ¯rst two. The advantages and essential problems of the proposed methods are also discussed. A number of examples are presented to show major di®erences among the methods and their potential usefulness.